Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Monday, November 05, 2012

A batch of new poetry titles - reviewed by Siobhan Harvey

These Rough Notes

Bill Manhire, Anne Noble, Norman Meehan & Hannah
Griffin

VictoriaUniversity Press

$40

A book and a mixed-media
exhibition, These Rough Notes is an
art-collaboration between poet Manhire, photographer Noble, composer Meehan and
singer Griffin.
Taking its title from one of the last journal entries Robert Scott made during
his failed 1910-1912 Terra Nova expedition of Antarctica,
the subject matter concentrates on this ill-fated journey and the equally
tragic 1979 Air NZ flight NZ901. Manhire’s illustrious Erebus Voices poems and some new work are set besides some stunning
photographs by Noble. The latter really brings home the barren monochrome
nature of the landscape. With an accompanying CD upon which Manhire’s verses are
set to music by Meehan and sung by Griffin,
These Rough Notes is best enjoyed by
complete immersion - put the CD on and turn the pages in time to the music.
Good to see that sales of this book propelled it into the top 10 New Zealand fiction
book sales charts.

Selected Poems

Bill Manhire

VictoriaUniversity Press

$35

It’s over a decade since
Manhire’s Collected Poems was
released. This fact and his recent retirement from the directorship of the Institute of Modern Letters make a new offering of
work by him timely indeed. The luscious Hotere portrait of the author on a
cream cover which envelops this book denotes the stellar work within. From
early pieces like ‘Love Poem’ and ‘The Spell’ in The Elaboration to the playful new poem, ‘Old Man Puzzled by His
New Pyjamas’, Selected Poems is a
rich starting point for anyone who mightn’t be as familiar with Manhire’s
oeuvre as they’d like to be and an essential addition to the bookshelves of the
author’s many aficionados. Indispensable.

Magnificent Moon

Ashleigh Young

VictoriaUniversity Press

$28

From someone who long ago hit
his poetic stride to someone with a first poetry collection just published.
Graduate of the prestigious MA programme led (until recently) by Manhire,
Ashleigh Young has had poems published irregularly in magazine for the past
decade and took out the Landfall Essay Competition in 2009. Like her
prize-winning essay, Wolf Man,
Young’s first collection, Magnificent
Moon offers a clever, sometimes surreal examination of family dynamics, in
poems such as ‘Giving my father frights’ and ‘A swim with Mum’. Elsewhere poems
about friends and work colleagues abound and, as in the verse ‘All the single
ladies’, sharp, feminist-minded subject-matter also ensues. Women, particularly
women of Young’s generation, are drawn by the author with a vibrant
self-sufficiency which simultaneously validates the strengths of camaraderie
and whanau. A bold first collection which suggests that here is an artist who’s
carving out a clear, intriguing set of thematic principles for future work.

Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick

Courtney Sina Meredith

Beatnik Publishing

$24.99

PacificIsland performance poet, Courtney Sina Meredith’s first
collection Brown Girls in Bright Red
Lipstick might be a diminutive offering, but the poems written within its
small red cover provide a big punch. This work glows with its inner-city
characters who relate their edgy, subterranean complications in streetwise
dialogue. ‘Don’t trust a Samoan girl’, ‘Space Dance’, ‘Back Home’, the titular
poem: here and elsewhere are verses which speak of the difficulties faced by a
diverse cast who belong to their author’s generation. If the emotional
landscape is raw, the physical landscape is portrayed with a vividness which
brings fresh life to places like Wakefield
Street, Avondale
Road, K’Road, Khartoum Square and Tamaki Drive. Brown Girls in Bright Red Lipstick is a bright work indeed, and in
its publication Meredith proves herself worthy of being included in the ranks
of the new breed of PacificIsland poets, like Karlo Mila, Tusiata Avia and
Selina Tusitala Marsh, New
Zealand rightly cherishes. Buy this book, read
it, then go and see Meredith perform her poems live.

Poems to a Glass Woman – James K. Baxter

John Weir (editor)

VictoriaUniversity Press

$28

This volume of previously
unpublished verses is released to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the
death of James K. Baxter. It features 21 poems which come accompanied by
perhaps the finest attribute of this book, a lengthy and worthy essay, The Winter of Beginning composed by
editor Weir. With regard to the poems, they were written when Baxter was in his
late teens (mid-1940s); not that this work is in any way adolescent or naïve,
as the first four lines of poem 11 illustrate:

Five swans flew over. Night fell from their wings

Flashing a dusky white. The cool night fell

To underwater calm. Sea rose in spray.

The few stars came in quiet.

The rich imagery and complex
word-play here are evident elsewhere, antecedents of the hallmarks of the
author’s later work. They are also significant because they fill in some of the
gaps in Baxter’s literary career mentioned in passing in previous volumes -
like Cold Spring – James K. Baxter,
edited by Paul Millar (Oxford,
1996) - which published samples of the subject’s 300 poems written in the
personally fraught but creatively productive period, 1944-1945. An obligatory
work for Baxter’s legions of fans to buy; and one not to be overlooked by
anyone who wishes to discover more about the early work of our best known poet.
Victoria University Press promises four volumes Baxter’s Complete Prose, edited by Weir, soon. Poems to a Glass Woman – James K. Baxter more than wets our
appetite for this.

Footnote:

Siobhan Harvey is the author of the poetry collection, Lost
Relatives (Steele Roberts NZ, 2011), the book of literary interviews Words
Chosen Carefully: New Zealand Writers in Discussion (Cape Catley, 2010) and
the poetry anthology Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems about Animals (Random
House, 2009). Recently, her poetry has been published in Evergreen Review (Grove
Press, US), Meanjin (Aus), Snorkel (Aus) and Structo (UK).
She’s Poetry Editor of Takahe and coordinates New Zealand's National
Poetry Day. She was runner up in 2012 Kevin Ireland Poetry Prize, 2011 Landfall
Essay Prize and 2011 Kathleen Grattan Award for a Sequence of Poems. A Poet’s
Page containing a selection of her recorded work and texts can be found on The
Poetry Archive (U.K.), directed by Sir Andrew Motion.